Certitude regarding scientific results generally varies inversely with scientific expertise/ experience.

Actual scientists are aware of the assumptions and approximations invariably inherent in experimental work, and realize that the failure of any such assumption or approximation can easily vitiate the conclusion. They therefore consider all results as tentative until replicated multiple times, ideally by different workers in different places.

Crichton gives the great comparison of climate and asking a teenager to take out the trash. There is no scientific method available to make sound judgements about such a complex system with endless variables.

But liberal progessives seem obssessed with insisting on the application of linear logic to all systems. As though they can’t help themselves from pretending the universe and everything in it is already perfectly understood by man.

If it starts snowing up in the “Top End” (northern Queensland or the Northern Territories), then be on the lookout for 4 guys riding horses.

What I’d like all the AGW proponents to explain to me, which they haven’t done adequately so far, is why is this period of supposed climate change is different than all the rest. In the entire geologic history of the earth, climate change has been a constant. Sometimes warmer, sometimes cooler, earth’s climate has never remained static. And as our resident scientists here have pointed out, the global climate is impossible to accurately model at our levels of technology due to the enormous number of variables, many of which are poorly understood. Why are the AGW backers so sure that this time is different, and that it’s our fault? Evidence, not faith, is what I want, and what I haven’t gotten so far. Maybe because I’m asking too much?

That’s a keeper!

My impression is that most climatology cannot be tested via controlled, reproducible experiments.

But don’t we at some point stop calling something science when we conclude it is unnapproachable by the scientific method?

In fairness, observational sciences generally have a fundamental theoretical problem vis a vis scientific method because of the difficulty/impossibility of conducting control experiments. For example, astronomy too has this problem; all we can do is watch, and the nearest thing to a controlled experiment is to look for fortuitous circumstances that approximate to a control. This problem doesn’t vitiate the science, but it does make its results a bit iffy. That’s OK, as long as we bear that in mind.

Having said that, it is still possible to make predictions and then see if they’re borne out in practice. (Hence the activity among astronomers during eclipses, for example.) That’s the rub with climastrology; I’ve yet to see its practitioners make a successful prediction that is falsifiable on a human timescale. (For a while they tried their hand at predicting hurricane frequency and severity, but after a few contretemps have quietly abandoned the effort.) If we accept at face value predictions of what will happen after we’re all long gone we provide an open bar for charlatans — who are clearly out in battalion strength.

I can’t disagree. But don’t we at some point stop calling something science when we conclude it is unnapproachable by the scientific method?

Michael Crichton gave a great speech about this that is on video called “complexity theory”. It should be required viewing in every high school in America.

As was this year’s. And last year’s. And the year before that. And the year before that…

The world is filled with Texas Sharpshooters when it comes to AGW.

One day, a prediction will come right, and you’ll never hear the end of the crowing. It’ll be a chicken sitting atop an ostrich egg.

Europe? Winters?

IT’S F****** SNOWING IN NORTHERN AUSTRALIA!!!

That’s like it snowing in Florida in Mid-June!!
Yes, there are other factors that do come into play, but still…

***SNOW***

in Summer

‘Nuff said.

Global freakin’ warming my posterior…